Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s new blood-freezing film The Seed Of The Sacred Fig was shot in complete secrecy without the totalitarian government’s knowledge or approval. This explains why the characters, a man of the Establishment, his wife, and daughters, look so disturbingly stricken in the film’s most chilling moments of insubordination and retaliation.
This is not an easy film to watch. Its slow-burn treatment of authoritarianism and bullish approach to officialdom’s dumb, unquestionable fascism tend to throw us off course. But then we settle down to witness what can only be perceived as the rapid decline of values and the complete collapse of the conscience. It gets sobering and scary.
There is a longish sequence where Iman’s wide cleans out a grisly facial wound of a girl who has been shot at. It is terrifying not so much for the sight of an open wound as for what it is trying to say about mob violence.
The film’s protagonist is Iman(Missagh Zareh), who has recently been appointed as an investigating judge by the intolerant Establishment. Iman has the thankless job of bringing protestors to punishment, including execution.
What happens when his own daughter brings one of them home? This is the crux of the dramatic conflict, which spreads into a sprawling morality tale with twists that mercilessly turn the corkscrew of corruption.
As Iman degenerates into a radical monster after his gun is stolen(why is that incident such a trigger?), the focus shifts from him to his wife Najmeh(Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters, Rezvan(Mahsa Rostami) and Sana(Setareh Maleki).
The women in Iman’s family seem to run the show, as he is an absentee patriarch grappling with the demands of an authoritarian regime. But then, things are never what they seem, not in a closed society.
The third segment of this chilling testimony to totalitarianism is not my favourite.
Seen as a metaphor for patriarchal inclemency, the concluding 45 minutes of this arching, lengthy, and excruciating “family drama”(done in dark, sinister shades, the opposite of what Sooraj Barjatya does to the filmy family) are exacerbated and unhinged.
I am not sure that the father’s overwrought mental condition and his clamping down on his wife and daughter can be perceived as anything more or less than a metaphor on absolutism. Is writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof showing the demonizing of Iman’s father as a microcosm of monocracy?
The control that Rasoulof displayed within the four walls of Iman’s home dissipated in the open. Freedom comes with its own intrinsic restrictions. I am sure the director who fled from Tehran to Germany knows this.
